A funny thing happened to me during my time playing Cynderblock as a Horde; I rediscovered the joy of questing.

Not leveling, mind you, but questing – seeing the World of Warcraft through the stories told through the quests you’re asked to do by various people. Leveling is different; the slow accumulation of skills, gear, and abilities through gaining experience is entirely different from just wandering around stepping into people’s narratives.

While questing is almost always the most efficient way to level, it’s not the only way. But they’d gotten conflated in my mind, and it was good to be reminded that the two activities are very different.

Silverpine, where Tauren go to take a break from the Barrens.

It turns out that I don’t like leveling. Or, more accurately, I don’t like leveling without a purpose. If I set a goal – get my banker to this level so I can get my tradeskills up to this other level, or level up to 19 to start building a new twink – I can usually do okay. But my server friends will tell you that I’ve rolled dozens of alts, gotten them to their teens, and then deleted them, all because I don’t feel there’s a purpose behind them. I get bored.

With Cynderblock, that was not a problem. She’s XP-locked, never to leave level 19. Her skills are all maxed (except Fishing, but it’s good enough to get her a Hat.) Her gear is literally the best it can be, for nearly every situation she can be in. And since I’d never quested or leveled completely through any of the Horde zones, I was really enjoying doing every quest I could find, experiencing the other side through her eyes.

So... where ARE the ropes? And shouldn't there be a counterweight?

Then I looked at my reputation tab, and saw that hey, I’m actually racking up quite a bit of reputation here. Maybe I could go for Ambassador!

Wait, what?

THE REPUTATION PROBLEM AT LEVEL 19

Strange Tauren in a Strange Land.

The Ambassador title is rewarded for bringing all five of your faction’s city reputations to Exalted. The strategy for it is actually pretty simple:

Do all the starting area quests for each specific race.

Do all the quests in the second and third-tier zones (levels 10-30), including dungeon quests.

Once you have an epic mount and are level 50 or so, this is pretty simple and just takes time to do the quests. The key is the repeatable Runecloth quest - with it, all you have to do is farm stacks of Runecloth and turn them in for small rep gains. For some of the less-represented factions – Gnomes and Trolls – this makes it so you don’t have to worry about finding every last quest. This quest becomes available at level 50, while the other ones open up at various earlier levels.

At level 80, getting Ambassador is even easier due to the Argent Tournament. Champion’s Writs can be turned in for 250 reputation, so you can just do dailies to get your reputation up to Exalted. It’s really an easy way to get your home faction reps up if you’re already at 80 without Ambassador.

But Cynderblock is not level 50, or level 80. She’s level 19. And the problem at level 19 is that there just aren’t enough quests to generate the reputation she needs. Consider the steps above:

She can do the starting areas for all the races. Check!

She can do all the quests in the second tier zones (10-20). Check!

She can do a few of the early quests in the third-tier zones (20-30), mostly chains that start early on. Problem!

She can turn in Wool cloth, but not Silk, Mageweave, or repeatable Runecloth. Problem!

She cannot participate in the Argent Tournament. Problem!

She does not have a mount, let alone an epic mount. Inconvenient, but not really a problem.

I may not have Plainsrunning, but at least I have speed enchants.

Wowhead has some great filters that let you determine how much reputation you can get with a given faction. Here they are, broken apart by continent, filtered for level 19s:

I’ve included the World Events because you might get lucky with your timing. One thing about doing this right now, pre-Cataclysm, is that the troll quests reward reputation, while the gnome ones do not. This makes me scratch my head a bit, just because of the nature of those quests. (Taking a package to a random gnome should not reward more rep than liberating their home city.)

If you take a look at all of these quests, you’ll find that you can get to Revered with most all of your factions, but not Exalted. It can’t be done with 5 factions; the numbers just aren’t there.

So the only logical solutions are to add more quests, or add more factions. Since the only way to add more quests is to wait for Cataclysm (a viable option, by the way), changing factions was the way to go.

FACTION CHANGING MAKES YOU POPULAR

Barrens Chat was surprisingly quiet.

When I faction changed Cynderblock to get BiS gear, I didn’t consider reputation. I looked at base stats (to maximize twinking) and a general sense of who ‘block was, and came up with two options: Orc or Tauren.

I went with Tauren, which turned out to be an extremely lucky choice later on. However, one thing to keep in mind is that Blood Elves are the only race with a completely restricted starting (1-5) area. There are no quests there for other Horde members, so your Silvermoon City reputation will always lag behind if you’re not a Blood Elf. ‘block is a Warrior, though, and Blood Elf won’t be an option until Cataclysm comes.

Here’s the key about faction swapping: your reputation comes with you, but your quest log does not. The home city rep that you’ve gained from questing is changed into an appropriate home city rep of the other faction, but all of the new quests are still available for you to complete. By faction changing, you effectively double the number of quests available for each home city reputation grind.

In other words: instead of ~400 quests, you now have ~800 to generate reputation.

And that’s more than enough.

As a Tauren, I managed to do almost every single quest available to me, 393 in total. There *is* a repeatable quest for rep, Chen’s Empty Keg, the only repeatable quest available to level 19s that rewards reputation, but I skipped that to see if it was really necessary.

Cynderblock says goodbye to the Horde where she first loved it, in Eversong Woods.

SWITCHING BACK

Switching back to Alliance, there was one clear standout for which race I should choose:

The Human racial ability Diplomacy makes reputation grinds much, much easier. Once I’d established that the goal was Exalted or Bust, this choice was no choice at all. No matter what other stats apply, a +10% bonus to reputation gains cannot be turned down.

The last thing to consider in faction changing is how rep transfers between cities with an eye towards the weakest ones: Gnomeregan and Darkspear Trolls. Blizzard has a handy page which shows how each race’s reputations transfer to the opposite faction. I took ‘block Dwarf -> Tauren, which moved my substantial Gnome rep (I’d leveled in Dun Morogh) over to Troll, which was good. When I took ‘block from Tauren -> Human, however, my Troll rep transfered to Ironforge and my Orgrimmar went to Gnome.

Oh, the sights I've seen!

So I came out of the Horde with low Ironforge rep and really, really good Gnomer rep. (My Exodar rep was also very low because of that Blood Elf issue.)

For an ex-Dwarf, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

SPILLOVER REPUTATION

I don't have to check the signs to know where this boat is going.

I was nervous but excited when I returned to the Alliance, my 5 Revered reputations in hand. My Ironforge reputation really had me worried, so I checked Loch Modan first and discovered that I had never quested there before.

But even after exhausting the quests there, I hadn’t hit Exalted with Ironforge – not even close, really. I’d erased the Troll deficit but had a ways to go. So I went after the new lowest rep, Exodar, and went after the Draenei starting zones.

Azshara totally looks like Xtina. You know I'm right.

The key on the last stretch was spillover reputation. See, every quest you do for your five home factions gives a certain amount of rep for the city in question. You go fetch water in Mulgore? +500 Thunder Bluff reputation shows up in your log. What doesn’t show, however, is that you get 25% of that reputation to the other 4 cities, too. That 500 rep for Thunder Bluff was also 125 reputation for Org, Darkspear, SMC, and Undercity.

And if you’re Human, every single one of those spillover gains gets an additional 10% bonus.

So doing all those easy quests in every starting area pays off for you, and the more questing you can do the better off you are. Going with the starting zones introduced in Burning Crusade means you can do more questing in less time, and still be gaining rep with your other cities.

That’s what happened to me. I got Exalted with the Gnomes, Exodar, Darnassus, and Stormwind while questing in Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles.

AMBASSADOR CYNDERBLOCK

Level 19 Ambassador of the Alliance, Cynderblock

In the end, it was a fedex quest to Stormwind that got me the achievement. It awarded 250 Ironforge rep, with +25 for Diplomacy, when I was 262 away from Exalted. So I knew this quest would do it, and lined up the shot appropriately:

And there you have it.

It seems simple in retrospect, but to be honest I didn’t know if it could be done while doing it. I never broke things down into a spreadsheet, because I didn’t want to destroy my questing motivation while playing Horde. I had a lot of questions about how the quests would transfer, about how many quests I’d done on the Alliance side, and if it would work.

But it did. It’s possible. It can be done.

All that worry, for naught.

EPILOGUE

Gathering herbs in the Wetlands is best done with friends. Especially friends with choppers.

I know I’ve said this a lot, but I don’t think it can be said enough: I’ve had a lot of help in making Cynderblock the character she is. Fynralyl spent many hours helping on both the Alliance and Horde sides, running me through quests that I had no business attempting, and driving me around to pick herbs in zones where no sane level 19 considers entering. And Psynister got me into this whole twinking business; his advice and help have been invaluable.

12 responses to “The Level 19 Ambassador Project”

And yeah, having a goal definitely assists in motivation. I had a hunter that was stalled out in the 20s. And then I had this weird idea to create an experiment in seeing just how profitable leveling a brand new character could be, and rolled a draenei hunter (with heirlooms) to compare against my fiancee and a shaman (without heirlooms). And…well…the draenei hunter is on the cusp of 70 already. :)